Evoland

What was birthed as a 48-hour Ludum Dare concept has evolved into a full game, available now through Steam Greenlight and GOG.com. As a fellow indie-dev myself (admittedly, a far lazier one), seeing this process come to fruition is particularly inspiring. Evoland is not only a journey into the past and present of the role-playing and action-adventure genres, it also attempts to affirm a dream future of game development where a smart idea can lead to a fully-realised product.

You start the game as an initially-unnamed protagonist with only the ability to move right. Doing so pushes the player towards a chest, which upon opening, unlocks moving the protagonist left as well. Colour graphics, save points and turn-based battles come next, and the game indulges in this pattern until you have a full RPG experience that touches most of the staples of the genre, such as Final Fantasy, Zelda and Diablo. By the end of the game, you can expect to have ticked all the major RPG tropes, including town quests, airships, and even an un-winnable boss battle, with one or two twists on convention thrown in for good measure.

What’s most apparent while playing Evoland is that you can really feel that developer Shiro Games had a lot of fun with the presentation, particularly through the visual work. From simple monochrome graphics, to colourful SNES-era sprite-work, right through to early polygonal-shading and HD textures, all the benchmarks of classic RPGs are here. At first, younger and uninitated players might be questioning the merits of this progression, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up converts by the end of the experience; there’s something intrinsically imaginative and charming about retro graphics that I don’t think is going to go away anytime soon.

Ironically, Evoland’s enthusiasm for all things nostalgic is where the cracks in the package start to show. Some references are simply a little too on the nose (Clink? Kaeris? Seriously?), which undermines the instances where the game is genuinely amusing, usually through more subtle and knowing means (“You got Enter Houses!” or the brilliant Apiyat/Apidya wasps). That said, it’s a minor issue that is easily forgivable compared to Evoland’s main problem – there’s just not much here. I finished up the game in less than five hours (83.4% completion), and that’s taking into account time spent doing some light-grinding and hunting down the collectible “Evostars”. On the plus side, Twin Sun, a collectible card game which is literally Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII with different cards, is still a great diversion.